The first electric car from Bentley will be a high-performance saloon

Bentley is warming up its engines and plans to launch several fully electric models during the second half of this decade. The first electric car from Bentley will be a high-performance saloon with a design inspired by the concept called Bentley EXP 100 GT, developed through the Project Artemis led by Audi. If you think of the Jaguar I-Pace, the idea is to house the batteries under the floor. Just as the Jaguar I-Pace is not a traditional SUV, the new Bentley will not be a conventional saloon either.

However, Bentley president Adrian Hallmark recently said that his company has not yet decided whether the future electric models will take on the design and lineage of its existing combustion-engined models. “Our position is to look at customers and segments. Besides moving to electricity, we will adapt our product range because the world is changing.”

This is what the first electric car from Bentley will look like

“We want to attract more women and be more relevant in the urban environments of the future, which are very different from today’s, and we want to appeal to the values of modern luxury, which are different from those of 20 years ago. We have already moved with the times, but times will change again over the next 10 to 15 years. The format, size and name of our product must be adjusted to the character and strategy of the product depending on the customers and where we see those segments heading. We love our current names. Perhaps they will continue. But we will always follow customers, segments and values, and we will find a name that fits.”

The British brand predicts that 110 kWh to 120 kWh batteries will be available by 2025, which in turn will allow larger models to offer a range of 400-500 km. However, it would need a battery of more than 150 kWh to produce a full-size SUV that matches the range of a combustion-engined variant. “We believe that BEVs with mid-size cars in that 2025-2030 range become feasible, and the larger [electric] cars come after 2030, so 2030 is the date by which we plan to change everything.”

This suggests that Bentley is unlikely to offer a large traditional grand tourer such as the Continental or Flying Spur in its initial range of electric vehicles, focusing instead on something a little more like a crossover, if not unconventional. “We are not frozen in terms of body style and so on. But we know the technology we will use and the capabilities of that technology. We know the dimensions and the pain points we have to work with, but those are just the basics, perhaps 20% of the work.” “We have also worked on many different options in terms of the design of the first car, and over the next three to six months we will formalise them, close them down and load up, and be ready to start. But we are still in that search phase, and we are not yet in the implementation phase.”